I bought this intel x540 dual 10G nic a few weeks ago and it’s been nothing but problems. The right nic only showed up as 1000BaseT in pfsense, and the left nic only showed as 100BaseTX. I experimented around with all types of cables and I figured the NIC had trouble. The right side 1000BaseT made some sense given that it’s plugged into a Gigabit switch. But the 100BaseTX I couldn’t find any other reason for.

Inspection of the actual card shows what appears to be pins bridged by the solder. I rarely ever have to work with electronics in this way, so I don’t know for sure if this is a problem. I really think it is though, given that the right side is not bridged in this way.

I didn't realise it was a cheapo cable, the wires are really thin compared to my round one. Obviously the colours don't match up to the instructions I'm following, could you help me figure the order please?

I bought an outdoor AP, but it only came in white or camo colors. I didn’t want it to be too noticeable, so I painted it to better blend in with the rocks around it.

However, after doing that, it feels like the Wi-Fi signal and stability aren’t as good as before.

Is this just a coincidence, or could the paint actually be affecting the AP’s performance?

Any thoughts—agree or disagree—are welcome.

At my wit's end

Reading the updates on Friday's FAA ground stop, the cause so far is weirdly ordinary. Per the Transportation Secretary, a contractor (L3Harris) was doing routine maintenance at a remote FAA site, replacing copper with fiber. Something in that work started flooding other routers, and the routers in those facilities were made in 2001. Controllers saw radar and radio data go inconsistent, starting at the Chicago center and then Boston, Washington, New York and Minneapolis. Takeoffs stopped nationwide for about four and a half hours. They're still working out whether it was an install mistake or a faulty router.

I've spent most of my career on networking and platform code, and this is the kind of change that looks low risk on paper. It's one site and a physical layer swap. But with gear that old you often can't reproduce the setup in a lab, and one box that starts misbehaving can spray traffic everywhere if nothing upstream limits it.

Duffy's line was that by doing nothing you inject way more risk into the system. I half agree. If you freeze an old network until the full replacement lands, it keeps aging and fewer people remember how it behaves. If you keep patching it piece by piece, every small change is a production experiment on a system nobody can fully model.

If you ran a network like this, would you freeze changes until the replacement was ready, or keep doing small cutovers and spend the effort on containing the blast radius?

Not sure where to ask this, but I have a Serria Wireless airlink LX60 and was wondering if I can use this to remotely monitor my vehicles position. (I bought it at auction with another item)

I was looking through some stuff at a thrift store and found this. at first I thought it was a network switch, but it has fiber optic ports.

To be brief, my daughter is 2 years old and wants to touch anything that flashes. After turning off the internet about 20 times, this was the solution to prevent her from turning it off again.

For a rack so small, to fill it out costed me a lot. Just glad it’s over. My security cams are nice and organized along with extended WiFi range and Internet ports.